Open Source

There is great potential in this idea and I can definitely see it picking up steam over the next year as more and more people become aware of it. In short, using an open source education system such as MIT Open Courseware project, will allow professors to write and share curriculum with each other. This is actually very close to the original intent of those who first created the World Wide Web. Professors can then collect the materials into a “packet” and share it with students in their classes. As more professors join these groups to create study materials, more of their work will find its way into the classroom.

The one thing that might hold up this idea will be the competition that is bound to start between open courseware projects. Each school is going to want to have the “premier” set of data. This will ultimately lead to the information being split into different systems and programs (contrary to the original intent), making it harder for professors to pull everything together that they want. Ultimately as the open source courseware becomes perfected there will be two or three dominant systems and eventually we will have another Beta Vs VHS (or Blu Ray vs HD DVD) as different schools and companies fight to create the dominant system for consolidating the data.

The goal of this project should be to create one single repository of information that can be used and shared, as the creators of the World Wide Web intended. It's taken 20+ years but maybe educators are finally getting back to the basics of how to use technology to improve the learning process.

The benefit for students is that initially this program will create free data. Eventually however I am sure that many of these programs will offer a print on demand service that allows you to get a printed copy for a price, so enjoy it while it's free.